MINIATURIZING ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS

8/18/2017 8:34:21 AM

There is more and more demand for increasingly smaller electronic devices. This is inducing the necessity to create circuits whose constituents are also as small as possible. So, the development of new approaches in designing those is needed.

Molecular electronics has emerged as a great solution to this as the production of electronic circuits using molecules would enable a massive reduction in their size. The current within these circuits is carried by molecular scale conducting wires called nano-wires or molecular wires. The efficiency of these wires is therefore very important.

A team of scientists under the guidance of Aurelio Mateo-Alonso, the Ikerbasque research professor at POLYMAT (Basque Excellence Research Center into Polymers) have designed a new suite of nano-wires which has high efficiency. This has been developed on the inspiration derived from the folding processes in the functional development of biomacromoleculles. They therefore used conformational ordered synthetic oligomers called foldamers to develop these nano-wires.

These have paved the way to a step ahead in miniaturizing electronic circuits; and are ushering in new horizons in the field of molecular electronics. This work titled “High conductance values in π-folded molecular junctions” has been published in the Nature Communications journal.